Surface reconstruction from point clouds is actively researched in computer graphics. This reconstruction approach is widely used for fitting three-dimensional scanned data, filling holes on surfaces, and re-meshing existing surfaces.
Although a number of algorithms exist that are capable of producing high-quality surfaces, because of the computational complexity, each such algorithm operates as an offline process, e.g., cannot be used for real time graphics processing. In other words, none of the surface reconstruction algorithms can achieve interactive performance for editing and the like.
Moreover, such algorithms generally can only handle noise-free and uniformly-sampled point clouds. For noisy data, this method may fail to produce an acceptable surface. For example, with real-world scanned data, some areas of the surface may be under-sampled or completely missing. Automatic techniques fail to faithfully reconstruct the topology of the surface around these areas.